It is not hard to imagine the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, in the not too distant future, existing only as a memorial to the idea of limited government.

The Colorado Supreme Court certainly helped the constitutional amendment continue its march toward a slow death this week when it approved a 2007 law that raised taxes on those living in most school districts across the state without a vote of the people.

As unfortunate as the court’s decision was — further eroding a fundamental right embedded in TABOR — it is as much a result of the court’s composition as it is of Colorado’s legal thicket of competing fiscal mandates.

The justices’ decision, though disheartening from both a legal perspective and a taxpayer-rights perspective, does have a silver lining.

The ruling provides an opportunity, an impetus for Colorado’s leaders to reaffirm and possibly reinvent the nearly 17-year-old TABOR and untangle our conflicted constitution.

I believe in capping government growth and having a vigorous debate about the allocation of limited available resources. I also wholly support the core principle of TABOR: The electorate should decide when its taxes increase.

If only our constitution were that simple.

Colorado’s budget mess has its roots in a long series of laws and constitutional amendments, each, perhaps, a good idea in and of itself, but together a muddled mass of mandates.

We have arrived at an untenable situation.

For example, Amendment 23 forces the General Assembly to continue to pump ever-increasing amounts of money into K-12 education regardless of any economic downturn. It also further limits the ability of our leaders to make difficult choices about how to allocate the state’s limited resources.

The Colorado legislature now has very little discretion about how the state’s revenues are spent.

Each fiscal component of our constitutional and statutory mess might have had a purpose at the time it became law, but this snowballing policy has derailed discretion and forced the courts to divine solutions even when it means undermining parts of the Colorado Constitution through legal contortionism.

It is time for our leaders to come together and chart a new course for constitutional reform.

If we leave it to the special interests at the ballot box, our constitution will continue to wind itself into a suffocating, sprawling and contradictory document.

And if we leave our constitutional reform to the courts, as we saw this week, the essence of TABOR — that the growth of government will be limited and the voters decide when their taxes increase — will be little more than an empty, powerless promise.

A failure to act — and act soon — simply surrenders our state to an untenable fiscal deadlock.